Epilogue
Pain is a revelation. It is a process, a leveler. It comes to remind you you’re alive.
You have to let the pain come.
On my third day in hospital, the nurse who had been examining me asked, “How long has your scar been presenting like this?”
I was woozy and out of shape. Dehydrated, ribs sticking out through my skin.
So it had taken me a few moments to realize what she was asking, and another few to answer her.
By then, she had called a doctor in, who called in a specialist. My scar was inflamed, hot to the touch.
The skin around it was a bright, angry red, swollen and weeping fluid.
In the end, it was decided to open me back up.
“You’ve got an infection,” the nurse told me. “We think there’s still some tissue remaining.”
Afterward, the surgeon told me there had been a thick black hair nearly a meter long wrapped around one of my lumbar vertebrae. She asked me if I wanted to keep it.
“We do that sometimes, in the cases of kidney stones and tonsils. This is a first for me, though. Never seen anything quite like it. Here.”
She gave me a small plastic tube about the size of a sample pot.
My name and the date were printed on the lid.
Inside, a long, stringy hair, curled up on itself.
Looking at it, I could almost smell that rancid odor which had followed me all these years, could hear the whispering from gloomy corners.
You have to let the pain come.
I lower myself carefully into the old wicker chair in the garden, turned to look out toward the huge rhododendron, just coming into bloom. Clouds move slowly overhead. It is cold, but the sky is the clear, bright blue of tropical waters.
“She’ll be here soon.”
“I know.”
“I’m worried this is all too soon for you, Hazel.”
I look up at Cathy and gesture to the chair opposite me. “Sit down. You’re pacing.”
“I’m fine. I’m going to smoke.”
“You’re making me nervous.”
She rolls her eyes but eventually she sits down.
She’s looking better today. Less agitated.
These last few months she hasn’t been sleeping right.
Danny tells me she keeps checking the locks on the windows and bedding down on the floor of Scout’s room.
She dreams of Andrew appearing at the window, that sunken place in his head like a crater full of shadow.
Mostly those dreams have stopped, she tells me.
Mostly.
“You know the nurse told me it was a miracle you made it.” Cathy rests her chin in her hand, her head tilted. “She said someone was looking out for you.”
“Yes, there was. It was you.”
She brushes her upper lip with her tongue thoughtfully. In the moment which passes between us, I hear the sound of the church bells. A robin, heralding the spring.
“I’m not sure about that, Hazel. I saw her. I saw her, just before I pulled you out. She looked like a burning tree reaching all the way to the ceiling. The smell was awful, like singed hair.”
I nod. I remember. The smoke had been so acrid that I’d ruptured my windpipe coughing.
My clothes smoldering, my eyelashes burned away.
It was only Cathy dragging me outside that had saved me.
My body had hissed as I fell forward into the snow.
Steam surging upward toward a night sky that had seemed impossibly vast.
“Your other sister stood right in front of you and blocked the flames. Tell me, why do you think that was?”
Cathy’s voice is gentle, as if she’s teasing something from me.
Trying to, at least. She sounds like one of the therapists at Belle Vue, I think.
I almost laugh, but I can’t deny I’ve been thinking about this myself, especially on the nights I can’t sleep, lying in the dark with one eye open and staring at the closet door in case there is a thud from inside. Or a voice.
“I think—” I hesitate, eyes flicking out toward the pines. “I think my other sister knew that if I died, so would she, because I was the host. It didn’t matter which body she jumped into, I was her incubator, right? It wasn’t a selfless act, Cathy. She was just trying to ensure her survival.”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Cathy reaches her arm across the table. Her own skin had been burned, rescuing me.
Hands to elbows, like she’d put them inside a furnace.
A witch’s oven. Superficial, they’d called it, as if there was anything superficial about the pain she’s been in.
In places, her skin is dark pink, blotchy.
It’ll heal, she tells me. Don’t worry. She’s more sanguine about it than I am.
“Did I tell you Danny has a girlfriend?”
“Oh?” I sit up a little straighter in my chair. “How do you feel about that?”
“Good. Glad. It’s strange. He doesn’t normally talk much about her, but last night he came into my room and sat on my bed. Rosie—that’s her, the girlfriend—had the same thing you did when she was younger. A tera-tumor.”
“Teratoma.” Terror-tome-ah. A sound like running feet. “Is he freaked out about it?”
She shrugs. “Nah. I raised him better than that. He just had some questions. It’s been nice, in a way. Since everything that happened, me and Danny have got much closer. I feel like giving him a fucking medal for making that video. If he hadn’t—”
My turn to reach over the table. I thread my fingers through hers. “Don’t. Backward, not forward, right?”
“Sure.” Cathy pushes her chair away from the table.
She’s on edge, I can see that. “I worry about Scout, though. Sometimes he seems to have forgotten it all completely, and then I’ll catch him looking at me like I’m a stranger.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m going mad. I am going to get a drink.
A proper one, with a high alcohol content. You want anything?”
“Go easy. You’re on those painkillers, remember?”
“One won’t hurt.”
We both laugh at that, because it’s never just one with Cathy. She’s all-or-nothing, and that’s what I love most about her. How fiercely she feels everything. She pauses as she walks past me.
“What was it he said to you again? At the end?”
I shift uncomfortably. I don’t like talking about Andrew, or that final night on Bray Farm. For my sister, this openness is a form of therapy. I’d rather bury it, down amid the dirt and the rot. Let it break apart and feed itself back into the earth.
Still, she is looking at me expectantly, so I put on a smile. “‘You can always knock it down and rebuild. It’ll look a little different—’”
“‘—but it will still give you shelter,’” Cathy finishes. She smiles, and it lights up her whole face. “Who’d have thought such a broken man could say something so beautiful?”
I nod. Sometimes I hope it was over quickly for him. On bad nights, I don’t. On those nights, when I wake up feeling as if I am drowning in hair, thrashing and sweating and gasping for breath, I hope he suffered all the way to the end.
“Oh! Here she is. She’s coming!” Cathy is almost breathless with excitement. I don’t turn around. “She looks so different! You okay, Hazel? You need anything?”
“For the millionth time, I’m fine.”
I’m not fine, I think. I feel like I’ve had wads of cotton stuffed into my throat. I tell myself not to be nervous—I mean really, after everything I’ve faced, how scary can a sixteen-year-old girl be?
“Hazel?”
Maria’s hair is growing out, becoming a soft fuzz around her ears.
Today she wears jeans and a sweatshirt and a huge coat with a furred hood which she wraps around her skinny frame like a comforter.
She’s putting on weight, but slowly. They’re worried about her bones, scurvy, rickets.
She’s had a lot of tests and a lot of therapy.
I’m paying. Joe sold the house last month, which has given me a bit of money.
Enough to recover, not enough to start over.
I worry about that sometimes, but then again, who wouldn’t?
“Hi, honey. Sit down.”
Maria takes Cathy’s vacated seat, curling her legs up underneath her. Her eyes dart around. For the first weeks out of Bray Farm, she’d clung to me like glue, even when I’d been in critical care. Slowly, slowly, however, she is releasing her grip.
“I hear you’ve started school.”
“Yeah. Just a few afternoons. They told me I’d probably get tired and not to expect too much, but I’m doing okay. They were surprised at how much Andrew had been able to teach me.”
Silence. Ah, I think. In all the weeks that have passed, Maria hasn’t mentioned Andrew to me, not yet.
But there it is, out in the sunlight. His name.
I’m surprised to find it has no weight. No gut punch.
It simply withers away to dust. Maria turns her head slightly and I notice the silver studs in her ears, the holes slightly swollen and clotted with blood.
“Uh-oh. You pierced them?”
“Danny did it with a needle and a lighter. I wanted him to.”
“Very punk rock of you. Make sure they don’t get infected, they look sore.”
Maria touches her finger to her ear self-consciously and I think how nice it must be for her to have something normal, to feel like other girls her age. To be nagged, to rebel, to make dumb decisions.
“Your hair’s getting longer.”
She nods, giving me a shy smile.
“Yours too.”
“You can use my name, Hazel. The real one, I mean.”
“Ah. Bunny Miller.”
“It’s a dumb name, but—”
“—it suits you.”
“Yeah.” Bunny laughs. “It does. Danny said all the girls in his class have names like Ashley and Lily. There are three Jessicas. At least I’ll stand out.”
We are both silent, thinking about all that has happened, all that is still to come. I think about a hair wrapped around my vertebrae, knotted there, refusing to let go. I catch her eye and say, “A bunny is tough too. It has to be. It has to think fast and avoid danger.”
Bunny nods. There is a gleam about her that’s new. I wonder if it’s happiness. “I’ve been finding out a lot of stuff about my mum. Her name was Astrid. That means ‘beautiful like God.’ Isn’t that lovely?”
“Yes. It is.”